Before Maurice Cobo washed anything for a living, he washed his backyard at lunch.
He was an electronic engineer then, and he had bought a house close to work. Chickens ranged free over the lawn, and he didn’t want their droppings all over the grass. So at midday he came home, picked up the hose and washed the yard down. That cleaned it, watered the grass and fertilized it in one pass. The fourth benefit he puts plainly. “I just enjoyed the hell out of it, playing with water,” he says.
The corporate job eventually wore thin. “Once I got tired of the corporate life, I decided that I’m going to pressure wash for a living,” he says. He gave his employer two weeks’ notice and ordered his first pressure washer, a custom build that took about a month to finish. That was 2003.
Pressure Washing Services Utah, LLC is still one man. “Me, myself and I, that’s my team,” Cobo says. There is no crew to hurry along, and he does not hurry himself. “When I get there, I don’t care how long it takes me to do a job,” he says. He gives a quote, shows up and keeps going until he is happy with the result, on the reasoning that a customer can’t be happy with work he isn’t happy with himself. “My name is on the line,” he says.
Customers who have stayed with him for years have stopped asking how long a job will take. “They know I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he says. “Quality is my priority and not to hurry up and finish.”
He holds a promised date the same way. “If I say I’m going to be there, I’ll be there,” he says. Being straight with people sometimes means saying no. A reviewer from 2017 recalled Cobo turning down one of the jobs on the list because washing it wouldn’t help, then explaining what to do instead.
Much of his commercial work is storefronts, warehouses and parking garages, and he will drive as far as a customer wants him. Now and then that means the Wyoming border, where a truck stop sits on the far side. Tractors and other heavy equipment pass through there headed into Utah, some of it huge and caked in mud from wherever it was working. The dirty machines, he says, get sent back at the border, and nobody on that side does pressure washing. So the truckers call him.
The drive takes about two hours each way. It is the farthest he goes. North, he says, he has never made it to Idaho.